Health Outcomes and Socio-Economic Status among ... - Index of - IZA

We use the average number of correctly immediate and delayed recalled words as our memory
measure (see McArdle, Smith and Willis, 2009).
Figure 7 displays the mean number of words recalled by men and women, by age. Word
recall declines in a concave manner with age, with a steeper decline at older ages. Some of this
shape may also be caused by schooling being negatively correlated with age; regressions will
thus be important to retrieve multivariate correlations. Men are better able to recall than women,
which could be a function in part, of having more education. Indeed, in Table 10 the SES
coefficients are positively correlated with word recall and strongly significant in almost all cases.
Age dummies are significantly negatively correlated with word recall. Education at the junior
high or above level for men is associated with 1.5 more words recalled, for women the marginal
effect is quite similar. PCE is also highly correlated with word recall, although the direction of
causality is much less clear. It is also the case for women that this correlation disappears when
community fixed effects are added. The community dummies are jointly significant for both
men and women. These results are consistent with the results of McArdle et al., 2009, for the
HRS data where word recall is highly correlated with educational attainment.
Survival expectations
In CHARLS, as in the HRS, we ask respondents about the chances that they will live to a
particular age. Respondents answer on a 5 point scale, from 1 which means almost no chance, to
5 which means virtual certainty. We do not ask probabilities directly since our pretest
experience, and experience in other low-income countries indicated a real difficulty for
respondents to understand probabilities. Experience with HRS and other aging surveys has
shown that answers to this question are highly correlated with survival to subsequent waves (for
example see Banks et al., 2009).
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